This did not happen.
Almost no Japanese public telephones even in 2022 have a) doors which lock or b) motors/servos to operate the door. The exception on motors is a specialty item "automatic door (electric type)" which is sold primarily as an accessibility aid for people who cannot operate unpowered doors. The door, in all cases, is for caller privacy, not for preserving the integrity of telephone billing.
I feel _extremely_ confident in this, and confident that you would get an immediate on-the-record denial from NTT if you asked. One reason among many: if the phone booth was physically capable of locking people inside that would endanger human life in a natural disaster, and the first rule of engineering in Japan is that one's system must function during natural disasters.
On this I will see "I once talked to a Japanese woman" and raise you "I have written the acceptance testing protocols required by that 'rule' for a firm which produced publicly-deployable hardware artifacts." plus "I have two working eyeballs and can confirm the absence of a motor in almost all telephone deployments."
(Apologies for someone-is-wrong-on-the-Internet here but we were extremely serious about rule #1.)
Why didn't you install DTMF filters on the phones lol I was calling like new zealand and shit.
And I'm talking like, 20 years ago plus here... It could be bullshit for sure, I'm relating someone else's story.
How did this work? Did it literally lock you inside and how did you exit?
It's something that happened in the late 90s, some time after I was in Japan myself. I trust the source, his Japanese wife corroborated it somewhat embarrassed.
Wow, there's a name I haven't heard or thought about in years... I wonder if RBCP's writings are still floating around somewhere. Even the fictional ones (especially the fictional ones, I guess) are amazing.
This was like 5 years before my own time in Japan but pretty hilarious nonetheless
Remember playgrounds back then? I remember one around Osaka Castle which was like a huge children's slide with those industrial conveyor rollers you rode down on pieces of cardboard (to go stupidly fast!),which I'm sure you could pinch yourself on really bad.
In Japan, they would just accept DTMF tones from anything that would generate them. There was all these people using hacked cards that they installed countermeasures against which were hilarious because people using these hacked yakuza cards would keep one foot in the doorway in case the fabled alarm would go off, i knew a guy who did this thinking naaah it would never happen to me. NOPE happens to him, he had to squeeze himself out of that phone booth and run after a red light started flashing and the door slammed shut on his shoe... Literally just playing the DTMF tones into the handset would have gotten past that on every 'grey phone' out there (The ones that advertise ISDN connectivity). Wouldn't be surprised if that still works if they still have those phones anywhere.
The other way I did it in another country was a telephone company test line (toll free!) which would give you 30 seconds of silence then a dial tone (presumably 'remote'). From this dial tone you could call anywhere in the world. We got some list that phonelosers used to make and called places like the president of Kenya.
This guy mentions using a payphone which accepts incoming calls to get the internet as a kid in the 90s. Those which still rang on incoming were mostly gone by my time but a few were still configured to act like that. Was fun to sit down the road with a cellphone and watch people be scared to pick up the line after watching it ring for a few seconds.